Once Nearly 100%, Teacher Tenure Rate Drops to 58% as Rules Tighten

The era of automatic tenure for teachers in New York City is over, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Wednesday.

Under tougher evaluation guidelines that the city put into effect this year, 58 percent of teachers eligible for tenure received it, the mayor said at a news conference at the Department of Education. A decision on tenure was deferred for 39 percent of eligible teachers, up from 8 percent a year ago. Three percent of eligible teachers were denied tenure outright in both years.

Five years ago, roughly 99 percent of eligible teachers — those who had completed their third year on the job — received tenure, mirroring statistics in school districts around the nation.

While state law outlines the general procedures for awarding tenure to teachers, the details are left to individual districts. “We’ve turned what had been a joke interpretation of the state law,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “to make it something that you have to work hard, earn, and show that you are better than the average bear” to get.

Under the city’s new standards, teachers are rated on a four-point scale as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective, based on students’ tests scores, classroom observations, feedback from parents, and other factors. (Previously, they were simply rated satisfactory or not.) Principals, who make recommendations on tenure, and supervisors, who make the decisions, were allowed to give tenure only to teachers who were rated effective or better for two consecutive years.

But as city officials predicted that the new policy would improve the quality of the teaching force, the results raised questions about its current state since so many teachers up for tenure were not rated effective.

The teachers’ union, defending the performance of its workers, objected to the way some of the evaluations by administrators were performed, and said it did not find the results, in terms of tenure, credible.

Many teachers, said Michael Mendel, the secretary of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, believed that their principals recommended against tenure for reasons not directly tied to performance.

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Mr. Mandel said principals were told by supervisors that if they did not do enough teacher observations, they “didn’t see them enough times to be able to judge.” Principals new to their schools, Mr. Mandel said, were told that because they had been there a year or less, they “didn’t have enough time to make a decision.”

The city said that it had given no such guidance, and defended its system as accurate.

Some teachers complained that the evaluation standards were unclear. At one middle school in Manhattan, for example, teachers were given two weeks to prepare portfolios of students’ work, with little guidance.

One math teacher who has a business background said she had rushed to put together a three-inch binder of student work to submit along with other data, including a number of satisfactory evaluations. But she may have been penalized, she said, because her students’ standardized test scores dropped in her second year. Speaking anonymously because she feared retribution, she said that a decision on tenure for her had been deferred. Only about 15 percent of those who qualified for tenure at her school got it.

“We all decided that if it looks this way again in January,” she said, “we will just all quit and the principal will be left holding the bag.”

The percentage of teachers not granted tenure in the city has been steadily rising. In 2005, less than 1 percent of the roughly 6,250 teachers up for tenure failed to get it. By 2009, 11 percent of teachers up for tenure were passed over. That shift is being driven mostly by teachers who are given an extra year of probation. Outright tenure denials — the equivalent of being dismissed — remain rare. Even as the number of teachers given an extra year of probation leapt to 2,024 this year from 465 in the 2009-10 school year, the number of teachers denied tenure dropped to 151 from 234 in the 2009-10 school year.

Mr. Bloomberg said that the city would help train the teachers who now will work a fourth year without tenure, and that he hoped they would all earn tenure eventually. There is no limit to the number of years a teacher can remain on probation, although last year, one-third of those whose probation had been extended were dismissed.

The mayor rejected the idea that the teachers who were given an extra year to improve were unfit for the classroom. “It’s not that they are bad,” Mr. Bloomberg said of those teachers. “It’s that they are not up to our standards yet.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2011, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Nearly 100%, Teacher Tenure Rate Drops to 58% as Rules Tighten. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe